Thursday, April 28, 2011

I bought a butter dish. it's only been about a week, but we're having trouble.I'm a soft butter kind of man. I don't get people that leave the butter in the fridge all the time. I need butter to be ready for deployment at a moment's notice. I don't have time to let the butter soften for each use, and my concerns about the butter going rancid are nonexistent.

When I'm done with the butter, I usually leave the butter knife resting on the edge of the dish. I've done this for years. I have always just used a small plate or saucer as a butter dish, and I don't feel the need to wash a knife every time I use butter. Now I own a butter dish. It says "Butter" on the side.

Inside: three newborn hamsters, stillhairless and all covered in butter.

This is all fine so far, and since I'm a lonely man who lives alone, my preferences always win. The problem is the lid. If I leave the knife resting on the dish and replace the cover, it gets butter all over the side and bottom of the lid, and that butter migrates all over the damn place and then there's butter all over the top of the refrigerator(counter space is limited in my apartment). This could eventually lead to a completely buttered fridge top. Then there are the fears of a 22-year-old Isaac resurfacing one night when I've had too much to drink, seeing the dish empty, and buttering a piece of bread by rubbing it all over the top of the fridge. I don't want that. No one wants that.

Maybe the fact that I don't want to wash the butter knife after each use means I'm not ready to have a butter dish.

Monday, April 25, 2011

The Ladies' Luncheon and Tea went off without a hitch! Especially popular were your tuna salad and ham salad finger sandwiches! Esther carried on for quite some time about the deviled-ham finger sandwiches. Perhaps next year you should add some variety, like cucumber finger sandwiches, or ribs. The only thing left is to respond to Opal's thank you note with one of your own. Oh, no! It's in code! Can you decipher it before your note is boorishly late!?

Below is a quote from a famous person encoded with a substitution cipher. Each letter has been swapped for another. Today's hint: C equals G.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Part I, in which Dylan picks up trashSeveral weeks ago, my neighbor Dylan noticed some out-of-the-ordinary garbage in one of the dumpsters in the alley behind our building. It was a pile of photographs, attached to carefully hand-crafted mats. Most of the pictures included this girl:

This dude was also prominently featured:

My apartment building has beds at the edge of the parking lot, which used to contain rocks and lights. They currently only have dirt in them, as some of the tenants use them for gardening during the summer. Dylan has been known to occasionally put objects in these beds. At one point he planted mannequin arms and hands coming out of the dirt. This time, he decided to scatter these pictures in the dirt. Dylan's a cool guy.I did not see or hear about any of this.

Part II, in which Lisa and Jess vandalize shitLater that night(I believe) my neighbors Jess and Lisa came home. They were probably high on animal medicine; that's how they roll.

Lisa and Jess on their way to church. In Hawaii.

They saw the pictures. They did not know where they had come from, but decided they could have fun with them. They taped them to the front window and brick of my apartment.I heard voices out front of my apartment, but people often stop to chat there(I live across from the mailboxes) so I thought nothing of it. I did not see the pictures that night.

Part III, in which Isaac discovers strange things afootThe next morning, I saw that another of my neighbors(Rob. There's maybe 25 of them. Only a few more get introduced, so hang tight) had sent me a text message at one a.m. It was something along the lines of:

"Hey man, what's with the picture collages? Is everything OK?"I thought "What an odd message. I wonder what the devil he means?".

As I left for work, I saw a picture clipped to the message holder next to my door and thought, "Aha! That's what he was texting about!".

I removed it, tossed it inside, turned the corner to leave, and saw the rest of the photos. Naturally, I wondered what the hell it was all about. I went to work with no idea what to make of the pictures taped to my window. However, I love a good mysterious occurrence and enjoyed pondering their significance while at work.

Part IV, in which a mystery is solved and a death is reportedWhen I got home from work that day, I ran in to Lisa. She explained where the pictures had come from. I said that she should have let me wonder for a few more days before telling me, but that I did enjoy it. The puzzle solved, I felt free to move on with my life and have more fun with the photographs.

The next day at work, inspiration(possibly from Rob) struck. I re-taped all of the pictures into a nicer grid. It looked like this:

I also made a sign. It wasn't nearly as nice as the matting on the photographs, but it vaguely went with the style. OK, it didn't really, and it kind of looked like crap, but I made it in like 20 minutes out of construction paper. I bet that girl spent hours on each one of those things. Here's the sign:

I realized later(when it was pointed out to me) that due to my word placement and the comma, it kind of looked like that sign was from my sister, not to her. Fortunately, people understood my intended message: I had a sister, and she died. Neither of these is true, of course.

I chose the name Katie because I used to have a fake sister named Katie. My friend Josh and I would talk about her at work. She had a horrible white-trash boyfriend named TJ that drove a rusted out old Camaro. Oddly enough, I found out after I made the sign that this girl's name is...

Evidently there was a bit of discussion among the tenants as to what exactly it all meant. I think most of them took the loss pretty well. On Friday(I put up the sign on Wednesday) I did hear this from the mailboxes:

Neighbor Dan - "You know what's fucked up? This is supposed to be a joke. I've been feeling horrible for this guy for like three days and he doesn't even have a sister. I just found out this morning."

Sorry, Dan.

On the bright side, I don't think she's really dead. After discussing it, I think this happened: Katie went off to college(she said she would miss Zack) and got fingered by some dude at a party. She felt bad and told Zack. He got upset, dumped her, and tossed the pictures she had lovingly made for him.

Don't feel too bad for them, though. It's like Katie said:

"Love me faithfully!See how I am faithful:with all my heartand with all my soul,I am with youeven when I am far away"- from the Carmina Burana

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The Monkeys You Ordered is a website with nothing but cartoons from The New Yorker that have been re-captioned in a more literal fashion. If you haven't been there yet, check it out. It's pretty amazing.